This past spring, I spent three months working on a story on the movement rising up in conservative circles to stop “woke” corporate America. One key character, Vivek Ramaswamy, is now vying against Donald Trump for the Republican presidential bid, but at the start of my reporting, he was busy parlaying the success of his best-selling book, Woke, Inc., into Strive, a $680 million asset-management firm that promised to put profits before social impact and chart a “post-ESG” future.
In my quest to discover exactly what post-ESG meant, I quickly learned that mainstream media had nothing, but eventually I found an interview Ramaswamy himself had given addressing it—with an obscure podcast called ETF Prime. The conversation was surprisingly unvarnished, and it made you wonder why he took the time to talk with them? How many more of these podcast appearances were there?
The answer: A lot more. Podcasts—by dint of their propensity for long-form conversations that create an intimacy between host and guest and then the audience—offer long-shot presidential candidates the opportunity to expound at length, control the narrative (in theory), and develop a following. According to data compiled by the podcast database Rephonic, Ramaswamy has made over 70 podcast appearances during the last half year (although I knew of at least another dozen that were missing). Most of them lasted at least an hour in length.
He’s hardly alone. The other two 2024 outsider candidates, self-help author Marianne Williamson and anti-vaccine environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are also on the podcast circuit. In the past two weeks alone, RFK Jr. has appeared on the popular tech and politics show, All-In (for two hours); one of the top news podcasts, Breaking Points (for almost an hour); and he spent about 65 minutes discussing 1960s geopolitics on an obscure history podcast called American Exception, devoted to the crimes of the U.S. empire, particularly the power elite’s role in President Kennedy’s assassination.
Kennedy, Ramaswamy, and Williamson have served zero time in public office, although there is recent precedent for a candidate who had never held elected office winning the highest one in the land. They seem to see podcasts as a way to build grassroots support and become the candidate of the Extremely Online party, to win over professional skeptics convinced that everything is rigged and they’re the only ones who’ve figured it out. Already Politico has covered the “phenomenon” of Vek Heads who have gravitated to Ramaswamy.
Presidential long shots used to have no choice but to crisscross the country to try to amass a following; there’s a whole Michael Lewis book about it. Today, Zoom works just fine, and you can reach a lot more people than might show up to a pancake breakfast in New Hampshire. So I set out to chronicle what they’re saying out there in podcast feeds while listeners do their dishes or run on a treadmill. What’s their message? Does the illusion of no one listening lead to a different message than a public forum? Who were they reaching? Who did they think they were reaching? Finally, are podcasts the technology medium to reach the silent majority this election cycle?
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.
The son of Bobby Kennedy and nephew of the 35th President of the United States has polled surprisingly highly—sometimes cracking 20% of likely Democratic voters—for a candidate who can seem to be running a Zoom bookshelf-background campaign in which he appears on podcasts where he can discuss vaccine conspiracies, the Ukraine war, and his industrial complex of choice, aka the “censorship industrial complex.”
“The censorship is frustrating,” Kennedy told Russell Brand on the May 12 episode of the actor-comedian’s show, Stay Free. But, he added, “through podcasts like this and other ones, the nature of media is changing, and we’ve also developed a lot of techniques for working around the media.”
For someone who’s being censored, he is not having a problem securing invitations to podcasts where he is asked about the things he says don’t define his candidacy that he then doubles and triples down on. He’s not there to talk about vaccines or who killed his father and uncle, but ask about one of those topics, and he’ll talk about it—sometimes insinuating ties between the two! If in the process he goes viral, so be it.
Two weeks ago, on billionaire John Catsimatidis’s podcast, Cats Roundtable, Kennedy told Manhattan’s most powerful Republican that it’s “beyond a reasonable doubt at this point” that the CIA killed his uncle in Dallas in 1963. During Blaze Media’s almost three-and-a-half-hour Fearless “COVID Cartel” special, he stated that the CIA has years of expertise in “doing mass manipulation of society—how you go into a developing country or an Indigenous country and sow economic chaos, shut down the economy, polarize people against each other, and create violence.” During the last 10 minutes of his 50-minute interview on Breaking Points, Kennedy got locked in a back-and-forth with cohost Krystal Ball about whether his unapologetic vaccine skepticism should be a disqualifying “red line” for voters. The show clipped the exchange, titling it “Krystal And RFK JR DEBATE Vaccines.” It racked up almost a quarter-million views in its first two days.
The inherently contrarian nature of a real, live, blue Kennedy appearing in some strange spaces for a Democratic party candidate comes with its own thrill—for listeners and viewers and perhaps Kennedy himself. Especially when a Megyn Kelly laments the “smears of disinformation” that he’s suffered courtesy of the media. Or when comedian-turned-faux populist Jimmy Dore gets “Jr.” to participate in his demonization of the Democratic establishment, and Dore then rewards him with the episode title, “RFK Jr. Says He Could Be The Donald Trump of the Democratic Party.”
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON
Williamson’s schtick is that she’s serious this time (as opposed to her 2020 candidacy in the crowded Democratic field), thinks she has a shot, but she’s the victim of a media blackout. A school of heterodox podcasters backs her belief that the problem isn’t red versus blue America, but rather the “political-media industrial complex” versus everybody else. This is her signature complex.
In March, she and former Democrat and fellow presidential aspirant Andrew Yang commiserated about this on his podcast, Forward, where she blamed the establishment for America’s lack of childcare, a livable wage, and paid family leave. But for every appearance where Williamson’s “prayer for America” translates into deft talking points about saving America’s healthcare system, she, too, falls right into the traps that can make her unappealing to “normie Democrats.”
The comedian Pete Holmes’s popular podcast You Made It Weird shouldn’t be the venue where a candidate undoes much of her work to present herself as the antithesis of the hippy-dippy stereotype wielded against her. Yet, there Williamson was in February (technically, several weeks before her official 2024 announcement) conversationally ricocheting around with Holmes from topic to topic that’d sink almost any candidate as a flake.
Assuming listeners survive (or skip) the initial six straight minutes of ads read by Holmes for Living Libations oils and Onnit Alpha Brain bills, they are greeted with an interview that covers both A Course in Miracles and spiritual leader Ram Dass, who was an Aries, but they’re not sure what he was on the Enneagram personality type test. Williamson fields questions about whether a 2024 presidential candidate could publicly admit to taking hallucinogens, and she warns that the ego is “here to kill you” and that “we’re giving ourselves over to an increasingly dystopian social reality.” Williamson has almost certainly won the ketamine-therapy voter, but it’s no wonder that White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre felt so comfortable publicly mocking Williamson’s challenge to her boss.
Last month, Williamson appeared on Breaking Points, a friendly forum, considering she officiated Krystal Ball’s wedding the same month. Ball and cohost Saagar Enjeti were off that day, but The Intercept’s Ryan Grim informed Williamson that he sees some parallels between her and early Jordan Peterson, “before he drifted off into what he’s doing now,” adding that she “could end up filling the same void.” It’s a tortured analogy framed as a compliment that inevitably comes off as an insult.
It’s also a byproduct of playing in these spaces where challenging acceptable public opinion is the secret to success, and Williamson’s embrace of FDR’s economic bill of rights is less interesting than comparing her to the professor-turned-pundit who first gained fame as a transphobe.
VIVEK RAMASWAMY
Ramaswamy, who built a biotech company that’s currently valued at $7 billion, treats running for president like it’s a startup. Currently in fifth place in the Republican field, he makes up for it by being, well, inescapable. Williamson and Kennedy may have fewer on their respective sides that welcome spiritual leaders or vaccine conspiracists, but Ramaswamy is peddling a politically expedient Trumpism Lite, tweaked to have (in his words) a “moral foundation.” He also has an industrial complex to finger when prompted: the “woke industrial complex.”
Ramaswamy is pursuing an aggressive no-podcast-left-behind strategy. He has done crypto podcasts, and podcasts in early primary states (New Hampshire Today, Wake Up Carolina!). He’ll talk to hosts of all ages: He’s been on The Conservative Crusader hosted by 16-year-old “GOP Josh”; a lifestyle-and-wellness podcast for women called Almost 30 (which he balanced by going on First Class Fatherhood); and he’s been a guest on the Better for America podcast from the Association of Mature American Citizens.
Despite Ramaswamy’s claims that he’s an equal-opportunity podcast guest and relishes “go[ing] to the other side’s turf” to spar with hosts, an informal tally of those 70 recent podcast appearances shows that he does have a preferred podcast home: very online, mostly younger, right-wing shows from such conservative punditocracy luminaries as Charlie Kirk, Jordan Peterson, Steven Crowder, Ben Domenech, Candace Owens, Toni Lahren, Dan Bongino, Ben Shapiro, and Tim Pool.
As if that wasn’t enough, in April, Ramaswamy launched The Vivek Show, his own foray into podcasting which would “pull back the curtain on the political process.”
Ramaswamy doesn’t make mistakes in the same way that Kennedy or Williamson do, in part because his positions have been honed in three books over three years and numerous Wall Street Journal opinion pieces. He’s prone to repeating the same polished lines so much that it begs a drinking game (possibly dangerous): One would do a shot every time he compares America’s problems to a type of cancer or says the lines “wokeism, transgenderism, and climatism,” or “Tim Cook and Larry Fink are Xi Jinping’s circus monkeys.”
But he’s seeking out right-wing voters, not people disaffected by politics who might latch onto an RFK Jr. type and his eclectic set of policies. If you’re not a modern-era Republican Party voter, suggesting that the United States invade Mexico over fentanyl or that a lot of the federal bureaucracy should be abolished, Ramaswamy’s verbiage might shock you. But for a right-wing audience, it is hardly a slipup.
No, Ramaswamy’s blunders are self-inflicted, trying to prove he knows everything, then showing gaps in his knowledge. In March, when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, he argued a bailout equaled liberal Big Tech getting a Biden handout, went on Megyn Kelly’s podcast to say so, and got sort of bulldozed by All-In podcast cohost and major Republican donor David Sacks. On veteran-radio-and-TV-host Hugh Hewitt’s podcast in April, the candidate bungled a question about the three legs of America’s defense (air, land, and sea) to a nuclear threat, a question that Trump also fumbled when Hewitt asked him during a debate in 2015. “I did not know what the nuclear triad was. But you know what? I’m a fast study,” Ramaswamy confessed later to CBS News chief Washington correspondent, Major Garrett, on The Takeout. “That learning process is probably the most important part, and I want everyone to see how I learn and to learn with me.”
These flashes of being a bit green, combined with both Hewitt and Garrett mispronouncing Ramaswamy’s name, reinforces how he just introduced himself to their audiences: He’s the consummate outsider. “I’m the only true outsider in this race,” he told Glenn Greenwald in March when he went on the journalist’s System Update.
There are two ironies at play here: Williamson and Kennedy introduce themselves in much the same way that Rasmaswamy does. Also, all three are desperate to be included in televised debates, a signifier of establishment legitimacy. But only Ramaswamy appears to have a shot at that, which makes all their tours through the podcast universe more revelatory—and also makes the debates even less important for voters.
As Ramaswamy likes to say, “You get to be an outsider once.” But in the podcast universe, maybe the appeal is that you get to be one forever.
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